A diary of my return to the world of typography, for the first time in many, many years.
Just before the first edition of Wogan, on 7pm the 18th February 1985, BBC1 introduced it’s first computer generated symbol. It was called the Computer Originated World or COW. Of course BBC2 had already had a computer generated symbol for quite some time, and I’ve briefly dicussed that in another blog post.
The COW (or “GE6MS/565/10 BBC1 Symbol Generator”) was designed by Oliver Elmes and realized by Brian Mason of the BBC Engineering Designs Department and Robin Vinson and Ewen Maclaine of the BBC Computer Graphics Workshop. The globe took 12 seconds to revolve, was fully anti-aliased (the BBC got advice on this from John Warnock at Adobe) and was derived from map data supplied as a database from Glasgow University.
You can see the glorious COW hardware in action in this wonderful video by Matt Rosser of BBC Cymru Wales.
As well as the COW, the refresh of BBC1 presentation also necessitated a refresh of the station clock, which was redesigned by Oliver Elmes and realized by Richard T Russell. The clock was two pieces of electronics, the GE6/545 to generate the clock face and caption and the GE1M/597 for the hands, but the presentation department of the BBC called the end result the “GEM” clock. I have covered this clock in a previous post.
Perhaps the most striking part of both the symbol and clock was the typeface. This typeface harked back to the ones used on BBC Tuning Signals in the 1950s.
The typeface was not off-the-shelf, but was specially designed. Initially, only the letters needed for the various BBC regions were produced. However the typeface made such an impression that the BBC wanted to use it in their annual review programme See For Yourself.
To make this possible, it was necessary to produce a fuller version as a Postscript typeface. All typefaces need a name and this face, according to retired BBC Graphic Designer Bob Richardson, was called Prospero.
Prospero is rather notorious these days for being the bearded figure on the front of Broadcasting House but, the name probably seemed like a good idea at the (pre-Yewtree) time.
I first created the BBC1 lettering in January 2005 for a Flash File on Andrew Wiseman’s 625 Television Room website. As source material I used offscreen shots sourced from VHS tapes and therefore the BBC1 caption is far from accurate. I didn’t use Bézier curves in Flash, so the bottom of the C is rather lumpy, and the B is very inaccurate.
My first go at creating the entire Prospero typeface was in July 2017. It was not as a font, simply as letters in an SVG file, based entirely on off-screen shots from presentation of the time.
However, this was largely based on guesswork as many letters were missing and it was not particularly accurate as the source material was sub-optimal in quality. Although I now knew how to place Bézier curves and have a much nicer letter C, the letter B is still woefully inaccurate.
However, once it was finished I did have some fun recreating symbols for my friends, including the following for Al Du Prés which he turned into a t-shirt.
Fast forward to 2026 and Mark Boulton managed to obtain a scan of the pasteboard of the full typeface version of Prospero from Alan Jeapes’ son. A few weeks ago an old friend of mine, Andrew Wiseman, forwarded a copy of this scan along to me and I felt I had to have a go at making a proper typeface out of it.
There is a bit of a mystery as to who actually designed the Prospero typeface. Although I had always assumed that it was designed by Oliver Elmes, the fact that Alan Jeapes (a designer more normally associated with the 1986 BBC2 “TWO” symbol) had the pasteboard of the font suggests that he may also have been involved in some way. Perhaps it was Jeapes who had to create a full typeface from Elmes’s original design. If I find out, I’ll update this post.
I decided to take my usual approach; designing the glyphs in Inkscape and then exporting them as Plain SVG files which I could import in to FontForge.
Things for typographers in Inkscape have got a lot better in a number of ways since I first designed fonts around 15 years ago.
Firstly, there is a special font template (Typography Canvas) with guides set up for the cap-height, x-height, baseline and descender. I found this very helpful and will use it again on any new font projects.
Secondly, I could use the Pages feature of Inkscape that had been added by Martin Owens. This allowed me to use one page for each glyph. The Pages feature allowed me to batch export the Plain SVG glyphs from my master Inkscape SVG file using the new Batch Export feature for pages. To do this, you should name your pages with the same names as the glyphs (e.g. parenleft, parenright, sterling, etc.); you can find these names in FontForge.
And, thirdly, guides have had a lot of work since I first used Inkscape; you can colour guides and name them which is invaluable for font design. There are also nifty new features being added to Inkscape all the time, such as being able to reposition points along paths.
If you are going to design fonts using Bézier curves, there are a number of things you need to know regarding point and handle placement. I picked these things up over the years but there are a number of nice articles online now collecting them together and explaining them, of which this one is as good as any. These tips are invaluable and will help you not just with fonts, but will improved the quality of any vector design you care to tackle.
Because I was creating the font using cubic Bézier curves (these are the type of curves that Inkscape uses), the most sensible thing to do is export the font as an OTF instead of a TTF. That’s because TTF uses quadratic Bézier curves.
To get your points aligned perfectly to integer coordinates (pixel boundaries) in FontForge, you can use the built-in Element > Round > To Int feature. Even though you can have decimals in OTF files, using integers means that the font will be smaller when you export it but it also improves the hinting and kerning accuracy of the font.
Because I have been working full-time for about four years I am very out of practice with typography and I made a number of rookie errors due to me forgetting a number of things that would have been second nature to me only a few years ago.
The first was not identifying the widest glyph first and then sizing the other glyphs based on that. I just assumed that the M would be the widest glyph and went with that. This was a big mistake as a moment’s thought would have told me that the W was the largest glyph by quite some margin.
Another thing I completely forgot was allowing enough space for descenders. I didn’t do that and as a result the Q looks rather odd in font previews.
However one thing I am glad I did do is make the project a Git archive from the off, so I could commit my work to my GitHub repository as I went along so there was no danger of losing any work. This also allowed me to “roll back” to any point if I did anything wrong in FontForge (which is not difficult as it can be tricky to use).
I didn’t do a particularly good job of kerning the font; I did the bare minimum to make it acceptable.
One of the things I decided to do with the font is not make the serifs come to a sharp point; I made the serifs curved. Even though it makes the font more complicated in terms of the number of curves needed for each glyph, it does mean the font looks better at large sizes and it is more how a professional typeface would be done.
As I get to learn more about typography it’s been increasingly brought home to me that the aim is not mathematical regularity—something I used to obsess over. It’s about getting the strokes to look even, not be even. Therefore I happily allowed the curved shapes to overshoot the x-height and descender, and didn’t worry if the curves and diagonals were thicker than the vertical and horizontal lines. I had always done these things before, but they bothered me. Now I relax about them.
I didn’t create any extra glyphs over and above those on the pasteboard. If I was to create more glyphs I would need to do some research into similar typefaces from the early 20th Century so that I would make something properly in keeping and I have several other projects I would like to tackle whilst I am between jobs. In particular, I usually create glyphs for the Welsh language. I think I will return to Prospero at some stage, and hopefully I’ll also have the time to blog about it here (it takes as much time to write a blog post as it takes to do the work).
So, after all this work, it’s admission time. I had rather mixed feeling about the 1985 BBC1 look. Whilst the globe was technically impressive I thought that the Prospero BBC1 caption was very disappointing; there was no overall BBC branding for BBC 1 and 2 and I really wanted the BBC diamonds logo. Although there was a definite BBC feel to Prospero, the Lambie-Nairn Virtual World (designed by Daniel Barber) that followed the COW globe was, to me, infinitely superior.
After a strong start the BBC presentation department began to increasingly produce trail packages for BBC1 that didn’t feature the Prospero BBC1 branding and I always got the impression that BBC Presentation was filled with people who didn’t know what they didn’t know as far as branding was concerned.
However the COW globe does bring back happy memories of whoever was in the broom cupboard using the COW to announce the early evening edition of Neighbours. I can smell my Mum cooking us chops or whatever for tea. 1985 was a very happy time for me; I went to a new school, had some lovely new friends (Ed, Raj, San, Tom and Chris) had Repton on my BBC Micro and life was very good. And the COW is mixed up in those memories.
If you want to play around with the Prospero typeface, the entire GitHub project is available for you here. Many thanks to Bob Richardson and Andrew Wiseman for their help with this article.
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